Senior Software Development Engineer in Test - Performance Testing - 100% Remote - EMEA

NOTE: This is a FULLY remote role, but the candidate must be within EMEA to collaborate with their team, peers, and internal customers. You do not have to be in the specific country or city shown in this listing, but please only apply if you are physically based within EMEA.

Hostaway is a SaaS scale-up that is transforming the vacation rental industry. With innovative solutions and partnerships with giants like Airbnb, VRBO, and Booking, we're taking on the competition and winning. Leveraging our customer-centric core values, we consistently deliver results that encourage growth, learning, and innovation for our team, our customers, and the industry.

Profitable, high-growth, and the first short-term rental PMS unicorn 🦄. Join us at our most exciting stage yet! Learn more about our recent valuation and story here.

About the role

Hostaway is seeking a highly specialised Senior Software Development Engineer in Test with a background in performance testing to join our team and ensure our platform performs flawlessly at scale. As we continue our rapid growth, performance and reliability are critical to our success.

Your Mission

As a Senior SDET specialising in Performance Testing, you'll design, implement, and execute sophisticated load testing strategies that ensure Hostaway can handle massive scale while maintaining exceptional user experience.

You are a performance engineering expert who thinks beyond simple load generation. You craft realistic scenarios that mirror production traffic patterns, design complex load profiles that expose bottlenecks before they reach production, and build the tooling and infrastructure needed to test at scale. You understand that modern performance testing is about testing as code, production traffic replay, and continuous performance validation integrated into CI/CD pipelines.

Driven by data and metrics, you'll establish performance baselines, and create automated performance regression tests that catch degradations before they impact customers. You'll work closely with engineering teams to identify performance bottlenecks, optimise system behaviour, and ensure that every release meets our stringent performance standards, even when deploying on a Friday.

• 5+ years of experience in performance testing and engineering within SaaS or Professional Services environments

• Expert-level proficiency with modern performance testing tools like K6, Artillery, Gatling or Locust

• Expert-level proficiency in at least one programming language

• Proven experience with production traffic capture and replay techniques (e.g., GoReplay, ShadowReader, Speedscale, or similar)

• Deep expertise in test data management including data generation, provisioning, and state management for performance testing

• Experience with CI/CD tooling (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI) and integrating performance tests into pipelines

• Familiarity with observability and monitoring tools (DataDog, New Relic, Grafana, Prometheus)

• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and understanding of distributed systems performance

• Strong analytical skills with the ability to interpret complex performance data and identify root causes

• Outstanding communication skills with the ability to explain performance concepts to technical and non-technical audiences

Nice to Have

• Experience with Kubernetes and containerised application performance testing

• Knowledge of distributed load testing architectures and scaling test infrastructure

• Familiarity with chaos engineering principles and tools

• Experience with browser-based performance testing (Playwright, Puppeteer)

• Understanding of database performance tuning and query optimisation

• Previous experience with PHP or willingness to dive into PHP business logic

• Experience in coaching and mentoring other engineers on performance testing practices

• Contributions to open-source performance testing tools or frameworks

• Experience with service virtualisation and mocking for performance testing

• Knowledge of performance profiling tools and APM solutions

An Average Day for a Senior SDET (Performance Testing)

• 10:00–10:15 Quick team stand-up. The team is planning a major feature release, so you initiate a session to discuss performance requirements, load expectations, and potential bottlenecks.

• 10:30–14:00 Analysing production traffic patterns to design realistic load scenarios for an upcoming test. You craft a new script that mirrors actual user behaviour, including realistic think times and multi-step user journeys.

• 14:00–15:00 Joining a collaborative session with the engineering team to review performance test results from last night's CI run. You've identified a regression in API response times and work together to pinpoint the root cause.

• 15:00–16:00 The product manager and tech lead want to discuss a new integration with a third-party booking platform. Your input regarding the performance implications, load testing strategy, and test data requirements is invaluable.

• 16:00–18:00 Focus time to build test data provisioning scripts, refine your performance testing framework, and set up automated performance budgets in the CI/CD pipeline.

What we offer

• Competitive Compensation: We offer competitive pay based on market rates in the country of the applicant.

• 100% Remote: Enjoy the freedom to work from anywhere within your country of residence—be it a co-working space, your home office, or even your dining room table. The choice is yours. Just don’t ask to work in our office (we don’t have one).

• Equity: Every role in our company comes with valuable stock options in a fast-growing and profitable company. This ensures we all share in the company’s success.

• Values-Driven Leadership: Our Core Values are not just words we’ve written to make us feel good. We leverage them daily when making strategic and tactical decisions.

• Professional Growth: Our rapid growth offers unparalleled learning and development opportunities, along with a multitude of career advancement opportunities.

• Annual Paid Leave: The specific amounts vary by country and are aligned with country and/or contract-specific norms.

• Geographic Specific Benefits: As an international employer, we offer different country-specific benefits such as Health Insurance and Pensions in countries where these perks are customary. The specifics depend on the country of the applicant.

• Dynamic Team Culture: As a global company with team members in over 40 countries, our diverse and international culture fuels our innovation and creativity, providing a key pillar to our success (and making it a lot of fun to work here).

Thank you for your interest. If you apply for this role, you will receive an email from our Talent Acquisition team after your application has been reviewed alongside the qualifications for this role and the qualifications of others who have applied.